Battle Scars
by Jampots and Heffalumps
Summary: There is a story behind every scar, and there is a reason that people are the way they are.


She was just misunderstood. She was judged on many things, but nobody cared to think of why she was the way she was. Nobody wanted to know about Bellatrix's past, they just wanted to kill her, and that really was unfair. You see, behind every scar, there is a story, and Bellatrix was covered in them, some you couldn't see and some were painfully obvious. All of them were battle scars.

Her first scars came when she was a teenager, at Hogwarts, actually. She was a good student, clever, but never quite clever enough. She wasn't the stereotypical Slytherin back then, but maybe the sorting hat could see what she would become. She would turn out to have loyalty that any Hufflepuff would envy, and whether you want to call it bravery or stupidity, any Gryffindor would be proud to have that much. All the Slytheirn qualities were there, they were just never used. She was different back then, she didn't enjoy hurting people, she never wanted to end up the way she did, and for a while she feared ending up that way. Something changed in the winter of fourth year, however. Things got bad at home. Her Father began to drink, he got aggressive and abusive, but she couldn't do anything. Her mother hid away, tried to keep her daughters safe too, but in every success there is a fault, and Bellatrix couldn't be protected too. He was like that for a while, alcoholic, violent, taking what he wanted - he was the man of the house, nobody was allowed to argue with him. She was hurt, the only man that had never let her down had suddenly hurt her worse than anyone else ever could. She went back to Hogwarts beaten down and scarred. She was changed. Happiness was never present, she rarely smiled. She shied away from attention and flinched when anybody touched her. She wouldn't speak to boys, not after what her father had done, and she was afraid of everything.

The years passed and eventually she graduated, returning to the family home. Her father was sober, and didn't seem to remember what he had done to her. She found herself in a world of posh dinners and balls that she hadn't been allowed to before. She built up her walls and began to speak to people more openly, seemingly the perfect pure-blooded lady, but all of this was having an effect on her.

This wasn't how she wanted to live, she didn't want ball gowns and caviar, she wanted love. She hit twenty and she was expected to marry. Marry into a pureblood family, of course. So a wedding was arranged, to a man she had met a few times. He was handsome enough, but never seemed to give her the butterflies she longed for, the happiness and the hope and the feeling of light. She was terrified that she would never love, never be loved. What she wanted more than anything else was to be wanted. Becoming a death eater was a way of becoming wanted - wanted by the ministry, wanted by the public - she would become wanted, and she didn't care if it was just to kill her. Finally, someone would be searching for her, finally she would be wanted.

She found love, eventually, with the dark lord himself. She found release in crucio. She had been hurt so many times in the past, wasn't it fair that she should be able to hurt other people, to make it fair? Every single time she use crucio, she meant it, but she didn't mean it for the victims. She pictured her father, writhing on the floor in agony, instead of the probably undeserving victim. She didn't hate mudbloods or half-bloods or muggles, she was fascinated by them, but she kept this secret to her grave, not wanting to be removed from the one place she felt that she truly belonged, from the one group of people that she finally fit into.

She was convinced that Voldemort needed her. She was thrown into Azkaban for him, tortured and humiliated by him, and yet, she was still ready to risk life and limb for him. She was proud of her loyalty to him, but not in the way that everybody saw. She was proud because she could love and could be loyal and not because it was to him, to the man that never needed her, never wanted her, never truly accepted her. She escaped, became a fugitive, and lived her life in fear. She never wanted to kill, but it came with the death eater title, it was unavoidable. She ended up killing her own cousin and the niece she never knew.

When she died, she was untrusting, ugly and covered in scars. The last thing she heard was someone screaming, people dying all around her, and she knew it was partly her fault. She was beautiful once, breathtaking. She could have been anything she wanted, and she picked love over future. She died in vain, she would never know that he was outraged by her death, she would never get that hope that he may have felt something towards her, she spent her whole life in somebody else's shadow, living up to someone else's expectations, playing the game by someone else's rules.

Nobody would know the story behind her scars; nobody would know about her past, nobody would remember how she once was - before the shadows changed her.

**AN: This thing that I wrote is probably going to make no sense to anyone, there is probably a lot of mistakes and I really don't know whether I like it, but I don't care. I had this idea in my head about Bellatrix's past and why she was the way she was and I wanted to write it. If you hate it, let me know. If you love it, also let me know. Well, thanks for reading, I guess.****  
****-Nutella x**


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